Position in chronology
CUSAS 31, 170
About this tablet
A small, badly broken account from the Uruk period (about 3300–3000 BCE), written in proto-cuneiform, the earliest stage of Mesopotamian writing. The surviving boxes each pair a count with a sign for a commodity, animal, office or name: a jar, five rams, and entries involving a high-ranking official (EN) and a sign later used to write the city of Šuruppak. Its exact origin is unknown, and too much is missing to say what transaction it records. It is a good example of how the first writing was used: for short lists of counted goods and the people or offices they belonged to.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The first entries are lost. What survives is a short tally: one jar; three units of something marked NA plus a sign we can't identify; two units connected with an EN, a high official, and a sign associated with Šuruppak. After another gap comes an entry ending in IB, then five rams, one unit of an item we can't identify (sign ZATU676), and finally an entry for KIŠ whose number is broken off. The back of the tablet shows nothing readable.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) [...] [...] 1 jar (DUG~a) 3: NA~a X (unidentified sign) 2: EN~a ŠURUPPAK~a [...] [...] IB~a 5 rams (UDUNITA~a) 1: ZATU676~b [...] KIŠ (The rest is lost or uninscribed; the reverse shows no legible signs.)
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
[...] [...] 1(N01) , DUG~a# 3(N01) , NA~a X 2(N01) , EN~a SZURUPPAK~a# [...] [...] IB~a 5(N01) , UDUNITA~a 1(N01) , ZATU676~b [...] KISZ#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 31, 170. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA (P433200) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.